Alex Haas “Histograms & Variations”
HG Contemporary
This event has ended.
HG Contemporary presents a solo exhibition featuring photographer and composer/sound engineer Alex Haas. Entitled “Histograms and Variations,” Alex Haas will present a diverse selection of works that include photographs, video and music, each work meticulously conceptualized to reflect the artist’s current state of mind.
Alex Haas (1963) was born in New York City, but grew up in France and Switzerland. After studying computer music at MIT and guitar/composition at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, he moved back to New York in 1982 to work at the famed Power Station recording studio and to start building a career in music engineering/production. Such seminal artists as U2, Eric Clapton, Kronos Quartet and Pat Metheny credit Haas on dozens of award winning albums. A talented musician in his own right, Haas co-founded Cypher 7, a band at the forefront of the electronic ambient music scene of the 1990’s. Since 2001 he has been creating and exhibiting his visual works that apply theoretical concepts used in his recordings. Haas lives between Paris and New York.
“Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.” – Henri Bergson
Histograms and Variations are visual metaphors, at once representational and abstract. They offer the possibility for a new way of seeing and expressing time.
My Histograms are digital images made by extracting and reproducing an infinitesimal portion of an analog color photograph. The Variations are works that, in turn, use the Histograms as their source and palette. In both “expressions” the original essence of the photograph ˇ the colors and their representational dimensionality – remain an unchanged fixture in the work. No matter the final composition I choose, the images source, or its DNA, is a minute slice of a slice of time, a moment in our perception of life.
Histograms exist on the border between perception and representation.As both a musician and a visual artist, I am interested by the analogous thought processes and techniques inherent in the recording of sound and the recording of visual imagery. In my work as a recording engineer, I thought of the tape recorder as a sound camera – a machine that captures a moment of time by transferring vibrations in space onto tape, much as a camera records reflected light onto film. Digital audio editing equipment allows me to view a representation of sound on a screen, so that I edit music using my sense of sight. The separation between sound and sight has faded and the critical issue of time re-emerges as a medium to be manipulated and represented.
Another key into these works lies in the controversial concept of “sampling”. In both my visual and musical work, existing pieces are used as the starting points for new creations, a process commonly referred to in the music industry as ¯sampling”. In the Histograms, the works being sampled are original photographs by my father, Ernst Haas. As the first photographer to successfully experiment with the multiple significations of motion photography, he developed a blurring of subject matter that suggested an unfreezing of time. His photographs and their evocation of time are the building blocks of my Histograms. In the same way that my DNA originates with my father’s, his photographs are the molecular background component carrying the genetic information that allows the Histograms to exist.
Just as music and visual art have blurred, many seemingly discrete social truths have been affected by scientific and technological advancements. new abilities in cloning and genetics raise questions about family and society that reverberate in the art world. What is the value of an original? Does a clone have the same worth as its progenitor? Although technology allows us to edit most human error from film or photography, do we want to? By moving closer to physical or scientific flawlessness and perfection do we really come closer to the sacred? And ultimately, what is sacred?
Even in their utter stillness, Histograms and their Variations are exclamations of hope: they speak of metamorphosis, of the transmutation of time, and ultimately of a past that can be liberated into new perceptions of reality.
Media
Schedule
from July 21, 2016 to August 05, 2016
Opening Reception on 2016-07-21 from 18:00 to 21:00